THE former head of Holyrood’s environment committee has hit out at a conservation group over its bid to gain new legal protection for wild land.

Earlier this week the John Muir Trust launched its Keep it Wild campaign, which aims to protect “unique” landscapes from development.

The move follows a number of planning controversies around infrastructure projects in remote and rural areas, such as the Creag Riabhach windfarm.

That scheme could see five of 22 turbines erected within one wild land area in Altnaharra.

It was approved by Energy Minister Paul Wheelhouse, who said it had “popular support”, but the trust says it could attract further major developments to sensitive areas and the case will now be decided on by judges at the Court of Session.

Helen McDade of the John Muir Trust said wild land is “a key part of Scotland’s natural heritage and national identity”.

However, opposing the trust’s push, former Rural Affairs, Climate Change and Environment Committee convener Rob Gibson has accused it of skewing the country’s relationship with the outdoors and ignoring history and development needs.

He told The National: “Our heritage and national identity is being hijacked.”

Arguing that land now seen as wild was used by rural communities before the Highland Clearances, he went on: “The worst thing you can have for land is monoculture. What we need to have is people living there, cattle grazing there. There are dozens of examples of human impact on what is seen as wild land, from place names and artefacts that archaeologists have found. We are talking about a widespread impact.”

Scottish Natural Heritage first proposed 42 core wild land areas in 2014, pinpointing areas of “high wildness” it said were of national importance, but had no legal protection.

John Muir Trust hopes to change this with the upcoming Planning Bill, which it says is an opportunity to gain statutory protection for such areas.

The Scottish Government said there is already “clear planning policy” in place over onshore wind developments and work in national park and other protected areas.

Gibson says “questions must be asked” about the trust’s proposal, accusing it of trying to “‘protect’ these 42 areas of wet desert in a devastated terrain from a suspect plea on behalf of Scottish identity and heritage”.

He went on: “What they ignore, in their headlong drive for depopulation and maintaining the disastrous monoculture any visitor can plainly see there, is that local people can live happily with wildlife and did so before the clearances.

“Today biodiversity and climate change demand long term landscape planning, not a subjective fetish draped in a twisted misappropriation of John Muir who saved some of the Sierra.

“Its application in a small nation like Scotland requires repopulation and rewilding to go hand in hand.”

However, launching the drive, McDade, head of policy at the John Muir Trust, claimed that the public is on their side, saying: “Protection for wild land areas must be enshrined in legislation before they are lost for good.

“It’s hard to think of any other public issue which commands such a universal consensus across age groups, geographical regions and social classes.”